Which candidate has the better solution — President Obama or Mitt Romney?

President Obama and Mitt Romney are at it again. Another dreary report about the country's unemployment crisis has them squabbling over the addition of a mere 120,000 more jobs last month and the tiny dip in the unemployment rate, from 8.3 percent to 8.2 percent.

Is it evidence of recovery, however tentative, as the President predictably insists?

Or is it further evidence of his failure to get the country working again, as Mr. Romney says, as though on cue?

An economy that no incumbent would want to stake his or her re-election on and which any politically savvy challenger would love to run against is fertile ground for campaign rhetoric, if not for creating jobs. Still, voters should examine the candidacies of both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney with some indisputable facts in mind. What are their proposals, for instance, for job training?

Talk about an essential component of economic recovery. Yet the federal government is spending about 18 percent less on its primary training program for laid-off workers now than it did in 2006 — before the great economic collapse.

How can that be, when there are about 12.7 million workers still looking for full-time jobs now, compared with 6.7 million six years ago? How can that be, three years after Mr. Obama took office with an apparent mandate to reverse the course of the worst economy since the Depression?

The answer is that resistance to the notion of spending our way out of the recession — a time-tested approach to economic recovery — has been a powerful political force throughout the Obama years.

Yes, the $787 billion stimulus — too small, by many retrospective analyses — created or saved about 2 million jobs. And it included $1.5 billion extra for job training. But that money has been chipped away amid endless battles over spending.

Funding for the Workforce Investment Act is down to about $1.2 billion a year. Compare that with 2000, when the unemployment rate was just 4 percent, and the federal government spent more than $2.1 billion on its primary job training initiative.

Here's where the differences between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney go well beyond sound bites.

The President wants to expand job training by combining the Workforce Investment Act with the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which offers retraining to workers who lose their jobs because of foreign competition. He also wants to increase funding for job training by $2.8 billion over the next decade.

And Mr. Romney?

He supports House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget proposal, which would cut the amount of money available for job training by 22 percent. Much of the savings would go to tax cuts for the rich.

It's enough to wonder: What if Mr. Romney gets elected president. And what if the economy still fails to produce many new jobs?

Who will he blame then? The president he ran against?

Or himself, for not calling for more money to retrain the millions of workers still without jobs?